| | | John, I was interested in your post because it confirms what I've been noticing and have mentioned to a few people i.e. sort of the global mobilization of money. One of the things we've seen in the last five or six years that we never saw before are the number of large cash sales. Now we are seeing cash sales for half a million dollars as a common event.
I remember when Vancouver British Columbia's housing market went to the moon when so much money was transferred from Hong Kong.
It all makes sense theoretically, that Juneau could be a sort of a sanctuary for the rich if they want to use it for that. But I had no way to quantify my suspicions. But it seems that is what we are seeing, not to mention just a general inmigration of people looking for a better place to live.
We only have 32,000 people, and we are only two hours from Seattle and have a very cosmopolitan, well-educated population, with all the amenities of a modern city including first-class hospitals, hundreds of miles of bike trails and a Costco -lol; but we are also surrounded by pristine wilderness second to none anywhere in the world, including forests with the thickest biomass in the world and pristine very clean fishing waters still filled with large and numerous fish and seafood. All three species of crab, King, Tanner and Dungeness, plus spot prawns for the connoisseurs. And the weather is very mild.
I just posted on another thread that it is supposed to be 62° and sunny on March 31. That is 20° above normal and smashes the old record. We had almost no winter and it has been so sunny and mild that people are fertilizing and liming their lawns. I did today. The weather up here the last couple of years has been more like Seattle's than Anchorage or Fairbanks.
And In a sense we are sort of a gated safe community in terms of our security i.e. women can safely go jogging at night. There is no road system that leads in or out of Juneau. And for the well off that want to get away very few places are better.
We sort of saw this happen in Sitka Alaska. When they lost their big lumber mill everybody thought they were going to go into a depression, but instead Sitka prospered because so many people found it a nice place to have at least a summer home in that it is on the open ocean and quite an intellectual Mecca for writers and the our chief artsy fartsy group.
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